Monday, February 16, 2015

Choosing a Lenten discipline

My formal study of ethics began with exploring
moral decision-making. How do people make moral choices? What rules are
important? When, if ever, and on what basis should one make an exception to
those rules? A rule-based morality has an attractive simplicity. The process of
assembling the evidence and arguments, and then analyzing which choice is the
best (or least bad) from among the alternatives, intrigued me. My seminary
ethics professors' research and teaching interests were also focused on moral
decision-making and moral dilemmas, reinforcing my initial orientation.

However, after a decade of studying, teaching, and
preaching about moral decision-making, I realized that my focus was largely
misplaced. True ethical dilemmas that require difficult moral decisions occur
infrequently. Emphasizing rational deliberation ignores the large and ever-present
emotional aspect of a person's moral life. People get into moral difficulty generally
because they fail to do what they know is good or right.

Perhaps as much as 95% of human behavior is a
function of habit or acquired patterns (Nancey Murphy and Warren S. Brown, Did My Neurons Make Me Do It? Kindle
Loc. 1472-73). Illustratively, I rarely consciously consider whether to tell
the truth, to refrain from stealing, to honor my vow of fidelity to my partner,
etc. I simply act in habitual ways. And, because cognitive research indicates
that conscious thought usually if not always lags non-conscious brain activity,
perhaps even the semblance of conscious moral decision-making is just that,
illusion rather than a reality.

Consequently, my interest in ethics shifted from
moral decision making to virtue ethics. Virtue ethics emphasizes cultivating habits (philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre
calls them practices) that express
who I want to be as a person. Virtue ethics aims to shape a person's character
such that ethical behavior becomes that individual's habitual way of acting. Christian
Ethics, I concluded, consists not of prescribing a set of moral principles but
trying to describe a pattern of life that leads to life abundant and human
flourishing.

I stopped pondering the question of what Jesus
taught and started seeking to know Jesus and how he lived. For example, I
stopped trying to reconcile the gospel record of Jesus saying that he came to
fulfill the Mosaic Law with the several gospel accounts in which Jesus and his
disciples apparently transgressed the Mosaic Law. I began inquiring about the
virtues (or habits or practices) that Jesus embodied. Jesus, I recognized,
acted in ways that bent or made exceptions to the Law if adhering to the Law
(or to its then prevalent interpretation) would have resulted in behaviors that
disrespected or devalued persons. In other words, respect for the wellbeing of
others was a foundational virtue for Jesus.

In contrast to rule-based ethics, virtue ethics
better coheres with our various relationships, a critical insight of feminist
ethics. Ethicists such as Immanuel Kant incorrectly contend that a person
should act the same toward everyone. In some circumstances, I rightly treat my
family differently than I do my friends and my friends differently than I do strangers.
Following Jesus' example has implications for all of a person's relationships,
but requires us to act in ways appropriate to each relationship.

Admittedly, virtues may evoke conflicting actions.
Do I tell the truth and hurt someone's feelings or do I lie to avoid pointlessly
inflicting harm? That is not merely a hypothetical query, as fans of the TV
show Doc Martin recognize. Doc Martin
tends to be ruthlessly honest, disregarding others' feelings. The show is funny
precisely because although most of us are usually honest, we routinely lie (intentionally
deceive) to avoid hurting another person's feelings. Good character formation has
taught us how to reconcile situationally conflicting virtues without needing to
weigh choices consciously or to compromise our moral character.

This Lent, try emulating Jesus more fully by giving
up or taking on a specific habit or practice. Then, commit to making that habit
a daily part of life for the next seven weeks with intentionally expecting the
change to become permanent.

A 2013 study at University College London asked 96
participants "to choose an everyday behavior that they wanted to turn into
a habit. They all chose something they didn't already do that could be repeated
every day; many were health-related: people chose things like 'eating a piece
of fruit with lunch' and 'running for 15 minutes after dinner.'" On
average, participants required 66 days to form a new habit. As one might
expect, some habits (e.g., drinking a glass of water after breakfast) developed
quickly (20 days) whereas those forming an exercise habit (e.g., walking 10
minutes after breakfast) required more than twice as many days to form the
habit. (J. Dean, Making Habits,
Breaking Habits, pp. 3-7)

The Christian life is a journey of becoming. Eugene
Peterson memorably described the Christian life as a long obedience in the same
direction, phrasing perhaps adapted from a sentence in Chapter 5 of Friedrich Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil. Concentrating on developing
(or ending!) only one habit each Lent will, over the course of 40, 50, or 70
years, inevitably result in a person who has a much greater resemblance to
Jesus.

In the words of Mahatma Gandhi (quoted in Bruce
Lipton, The Biology of Belief, p. 114):